SOURCE: Mazurek, Raymond A. “Metafiction, the Historical Novel, and Coover's The Public Burning.” Critique 23, no. 3 (spring 1982): 29-42.

[In the following essay, Mazurek views Robert Coover's The Public Burning as a metafictional historical novel.]

Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977), a fictionalized account of the Rosenberg case told largely from the point of view of Richard Nixon, combines metafictional techniques with a critique of American history and ideology. Among the many recent examples of serious historical fiction, Coover's novel seems unusual in the extent of its satire and the bitterness of its vision. As the often perplexed and sometimes hostile response of readers and critics indicates, The Public Burning is an “explosive object.”¹ Whatever our difficulties in responding to Coover's text, it is well worth examining, for it reveals the problems confronted by a new kind of historical novel that has emerged in recent years.

The “major novels of the last decade or so,” a critic has noted, “have tended strongly toward the apparently worn-out form of the historical novel”; yet the novels by such writers as Pynchon, Barth, Garcia-Marquez, and Fowles, as well as Coover, “are not novels based upon the empirical concepts of history that dominated Western thought in the nineteenth century.”² What is “new” in the new historical novel is its treatment of history as a form of discourse. Extending the metafictional critique of the realistic novel, novels like The Public Burning imply not only that the realistic novel is a series of conventional signs masking as reality, but that history itself depends on conventions of narrative, language, and ideology in order to present an account of “what really happened.” The new historical novel, then, differs from the traditional historical novel defined by Lukacs, which aims to present a “total” model of a society undergoing historical change, and which avoids reminding the reader of its limitations as a textual version of history.³

The example of The Public Burning, however, suggests that the metafictional historical novel cannot completely efface the problems of other historical narratives. Insofar as it is an historical novel, The Public Burning makes use of actual historical materials, and its irony is often predicated on the reader's awareness of those documents. Moreover, its treatment of history is not merely parodic, for The Public Burning is built upon a basic paradox: while presenting history as discursive, it also presents a model of the history within which Nixon and the Rosenbergs act and are trapped. The bridge between the metafictional techniques and historical content of Coover's novel is provided by its criticism of American ideology: by emphasizing the limits of historical discourse in the America of the 1950's, it points to the limits of American ideology and the use of language as power.

The model of history that The Public Burning embodies is a structuralist model: history becomes the story of cultural signs and ideological constrictions which appear autonomous and self-generating. Indeed, The Public Burning and other metafictional historical novels bear a considerable similarity to the “metahistorical” analysis of history by recent theorists.⁴ While such parallels suggest that Coover's novel deserves more serious treatment than it has received, and while structuralist approaches to history are certainly productive in an age saturated by information, The Public Burning is beset by the dilemma which has troubled structuralism: to the degree that history is analyzed only in terms of discourse, historical change—the processes of history itself—cannot be accounted for. History, we are reminded, “is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational,” notwithstanding “the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form.”⁵ Perhaps the irreducible otherness of history, the resistance of the complex events and practices of human existence to being completely reduced to narrative form, makes the analysis of history as discourse so powerful an insight, capable of pointing to the gaps in any given historical account.

The Public Burning repeatedly reminds us of the textual form through which history is mediated, but when it needs to evoke the social situation within which historical narratives operate, it instead offers further, increasingly outlandish, “rewritings” of historical events. Obviously, a novel cannot be expected to provide a coherent historical argument; however, the aesthetic problems of The Public Burning are closely related to its historical incoherence. The failure of its political critique of recent American history to coincide with its almost obsessive exploitation of the possibility of treating history as discourse is what makes The Public Burning so exasperating a novel for many readers.

The Public Burning has achieved notoriety primarily by its extensive—and rather free—use of actual people, documents, and events, which has seemed particularly disturbing to critics who would prefer a clear distinction between “fact” and “fiction.”⁶ In particular, the use of Richard Nixon has provoked controversy, and although the most striking feature of the novel, Coover's Nixon presents only about half the text. Structurally, the novel consists of about thirty chapters divided into a Prologue, four main sections (“Wednesday-Thursday,” “Friday Morning,” “Friday Afternoon,” and “Friday Evening”), and an Epilogue. Three interruptions or “Intermezzos,” written either in verse or as dramatic scenes, separate the four main sections. Every second chapter is presented from “Nixon's” point of view. The other sections use a variety of styles to depict the global and national events leading to and including the execution of the Rosenbergs. A mass of journalistic detail with obvious sources in the media of the fifties is presented, though with a parodic exaggeration most clearly embodied in the fantastic activities of Uncle Sam. Sam, a garrulous, mean, arrogant creature with supernatural powers, is Coover's strangest creation, combining the crudest American humor with the attributes of Superman and other comic-book heroes. A shape-changer who “incarnates” himself into those he chooses to become President, and whose speech is a motely of American cliches, Sam is, to a degree, Protean; however, the possibilities which Sam represents prove to be narrowly circumscribed. Beneath his apparent plurality, Sam represents a one-dimensional American ideology, a body of ideas and practices which (at least in the world of Coover's text) have established hegemony within American society.

As Coover presents it, that ideology includes a combination of paranoiac anti-communism and an almost child-like belief in American superiority. The Rosenbergs are to be burned in the electric chair in Times Square for being infected with the spirit of the “Phantom,” the dark power that opposes Uncle Sam throughout the world. Sentenced under a law that reads that “any man who is dominated by demonic spirits to the extent that he gives voice to apostasy is to be subject to the judgment upon sorcerers and wizards,” the Rosenbergs are to be publicly executed for reasons that are “theatrical, political, whimsical.”⁷ The Rosenbergs, entrapped within the categories of Uncle Sam's world, are the victims of an ideological closure of political discourse. When Justice William O. Douglas creates a temporary crisis by issuing a stay of execution, Uncle Sam appears to Douglas to accuse him of treason, only to disappear when the janitor enters the room, leaving Douglas, symbolically, talking to himself. Similarly, in the most interesting of the “Intermezzos,” Eisenhower and Ethel Rosenberg appear on stage together in a confrontation reminiscent of absurdist drama and the cartoons of Jules Feiffer: Eisenhower's refusal of clemency is interspersed with Ethel's plea for life, but both characters speak monologues. Neither succeeds in addressing the other: Ethel is not given the opportunity; the President, Coover's stage directions indicate, does not “even acknowledge her presence on the same stage” (247).

Coover's Nixon is in a better situation than Ethel Rosenberg, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind. He, too, is hardly “acknowledged on the stage” by Eisenhower and the President's symbolic surrogate, Uncle Sam. Nixon's narrative presents his repeated attempt to overcome his position as outsider and to arrive at the center, even to become the author, of history. Despite the constant irony produced by our awareness of the identity of the speaker, the “Nixon” sections of the novel closely resemble traditional first-person narrative. But Nixon's grandiose hopes, fears, and plots—as well as his surprisingly sentimental moments—serve only to emphasize the failure of the egocentric world view often implied in the traditional novel. Nixon's hope to change history only reminds us of his insignificance. Coover's choice of Nixon as metaphor seems related to Nixon's inflated significance in the popular press; however, Coover alters Nixon's conventional image by attempting to conjoin Nixon and the Rosenbergs as victims.

Coover's Nixon is a victim of Uncle Sam's ideology as well as one of its executioners. Like the reader, he approaches the Rosenbergs with a post-Watergate consciousness; he identifies with the Rosenbergs (especially Julius) as “the Generation of the Great Depression” (143) and as fellow victims of American history: “Our purposes, after all, were much the same; to convince a stubbornly suspicious American public—our judges—of our innocence. And we were innocent” (309). Nixon is purportedly speaking about the accusations which led to the Checkers speech, but the words Coover gives him have a larger resonance. Coover's re-envisioning of history juxtaposes Watergate, the Rosenberg case, and the sense of American history as conflict so characteristic of the Vietnam era. Though the noisy demonstrators outside Coover's White House and in his Times Square are numerous, much of the conflict occurs within Nixon himself while he attempts to tell his story. Oddly enough, the technique becomes part of a significant refusal to join in the “scapegoat” interpretation of American history (i.e., “throw the bum out, so we can get on with the bicentennial”) that seemed so common at the time Coover's novel appeared.⁸ Instead of attacking or excusing Nixon as an individual, Coover focuses on the ideology that formed Nixon, in a context which foregrounds the problematic (and rhetorical) nature of historical interpretation.

Many of the discussions of the limitations of historical interpretation in The Public Burning focus on the presentation of current history by the media. In Chapter 10, “Pilgrimage to The New York Times,” the disjunction between the concepts and descriptions which become “news” and the reality they evoke is repeatedly stressed. The Times is described as a group of sacred tablets, an institution to which millions make their morning pilgrimage, including Julius Rosenberg:

Often enough … he has discovered himself here on these slabs, or something they said was himself (“the accused,” they call him, but the words keep melting and blurring on him, and what he sees there is “the accursed”), but he has not recognized his own image, grown gigantesque, eviscerated, unseeing: it's like looking into some weird funhouse mirror that stretches one's shape so thin you can see right through it. He used to think that if he could just find his way onto these tablets everything would be all right, but now he knows this is impossible: nothing living ever appears here at all, only presumptions … within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold. No matter how crazy it is.

(192)

Julius' nightmarish experience of seeing “himself” in print illustrates that Coover's attack is not merely on the limits of historical narrative but on the ideological function of the “orderly and reasonable picture of life” The Times presents. The presentation of history (“the times”) as news, then, is the occasion of Coover's most sustained discussion of historical narrative.

The Times, as an institution which defines the “facts” in a spirit of “objectivity,” is satirized, and its readers are compared to “mystics” for whom

the Spirit, annunciating reality, displaces it, and the tangible world dissolves even as it is being proclaimed. … People press themselves against the Father's Day advertisements and crisis tabulations, fail to notice the people leaping out of buildings, girls being raped on subway platforms … cannot see the crowds gathering outside the Supreme Court building, the writing on the subway walls: OBJECTIFICATION IS THE PRACTICE OF ALIENATION!

(194)

Using the language of Hegel (“Spirit,” “objectification,” “alienation”), The Public Burning suggests that uncritical acceptance of the reality “annunciated” as a picture of “the times” in the fifties becomes a way of not knowing those parts of reality that are excluded from the news. Thus, the apparent “objectivity” of The Times conceals an idealism which mistakes its own language for reality and is unable to recognize the alienation which results.

The process of “objectification” creates a monolithic version of history which has a hegemonic function, regardless of the intentions of those who write the news. Listing questions like “Is Alger Hiss a Communist? Is Joe McCarthy a Fascist? Is Justice Douglas a Traitor?” Coover notes that what “matters is: where are such questions being asked?” (195). While the twentieth century has come “to accept the objective reality of time and thus of process—history does not repeat, … and out in that flow all such assertions may be true, false, inconsequential, or all at the same time,” The Times reifies this “time-process into something hard and—momentarily anyway—durable” (195). The repeated presentation of predications which make “Hiss” equivalent to “Communist” transforms them into unquestioned truths. The act of selection—the ritual of inclusion and exclusion which constitutes the news—belies objectivity: “‘Objectivity’ is in spite of itself a willful program for the stacking of perceptions. … Conscious or not, The New York Times statuary functions as a charter of moral and social order, … defining meaningful actions merely by showing them” (191). The “objectivity” of The Times creates a silent reinforcement of the hegemony of American ideology in a world where true mimesis is impossible.

Most of the historiographical comments in The Public Burning are made by Coover's Nixon; much of the plot consists of his belated attempt to “save” the Rosenbergs after he discovers the ambiguity of historical interpretation in the fantastic nature of their trial. Absorbed by the numerous parallels between his life and those of the Rosenbergs, Coover's Nixon sees through the efforts of the prosecutor “to make what might later seem like nothing more than a series of overlapping fictions cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth” (122). Endowed by Coover with a considerable capacity for reflection and fantasy, Nixon repeatedly describes history as writing and as theater. Everyone in the trial was, he notes, “behaving like actors … in a play” (117). After a detailed discussion of the trial,⁹ Nixon asks: “What was fact, what intent, what was framework, what was essence? Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out” (136).

Nixon replaces Sam's and Eisenhower's Manichean interpretation of American history as a “War Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness” (149) with the familiar idea of unbounded American open-endedness and freedom: any “rewriting” of the “script” of history seems possible to him:

And then I realized what it was that had been bothering me: that sense that everything was somehow inevitable, as though it had been scripted out in advance. But bullshit! There were no scripts, … no final scenes, there was just action, and then more action! Maybe in Russia History had a plot because one was being laid on, but not here—that was what freedom was all about.

(362)

Nixon, who once aspired to be a playwright, sees himself as the potential writer of an otherwise patternless history—although in the world of The Public Burning, a plot is clearly “being laid on,” a structure of cultural relationships in which Nixon is contained. Staring at the mass of paper strewn around his office, Coover's Nixon characterizes the Rosenbergs as trapped by “the zeal for pattern. For story. And they'd been seduced by this. If they could say to hell with History, they'd be home free” (305). To some extent, Nixon functions to place the Rosenbergs, too, in an ironic perspective. However, Coover's irony falls much more heavily on Nixon, who is unable to transcend the idea that history is unbounded discourse and free, self-determined action. Although he is bounded by the cultural ideology The Public Burning describes, his version of history is a private one, in which he is the central character.

Armed with his ironic conception of history, Coover's Nixon goes to Sing Sing to try to persuade the Rosenbergs to confess to something, in return for having their persecutors partly exposed and their lives saved. Having discovered that historical truth is relative and that identity involves role-playing, Nixon attempts to play all roles simultaneously, to stand on both sides of the conflict. The result, if read too literally, is perhaps the most tasteless scene in American literature, as Nixon attempts to seduce Ethel Rosenberg. In the process, Nixon discovers that he shares the other American history, which he envisions as the dream of the common man who was “America itself” but who “awoke—we both awoke—to the nightmare of poverty, neglect, and despair” (438). Yet he achieves these insights while his “tongue roamed behind Ethel's incisors” (438) in a sophomoric rediscovery of sex.

In this passage, Coover's style oscillates between black humor and an attempt to reconcile the novel's oppositions. On one level, Nixon's insight into the “other America” is what might be called a “structuralist epiphany”:¹⁰ Coover's Nixon attains insight into the common humanity of his opponent by seeing the opposition's view as a script, a possible and plausible version of reality which he is capable of sharing. On another level, Nixon is satirized: he is unaware of the lust which has motivated his trip, of the necessity of choice, and of the choices, within the social structure, he has already made.

Nixon's failure is dramatized through the somewhat over-explicit satire of the novel's final chapters, where Ethel becomes a symbol of resistance. Nixon is spirited away to Times Square (where only one version of time is permitted) with his pants down to speak before the assembled mob and is eventually raped by Uncle Sam, who literally “incarnates” himself in Richard to symbolize his selection for eventual Presidency. Ethel, we learn, has managed to write “I am a scamp” on Richard's posterior, and like the Rosenberg trial, she refuses to die easily. When she was not killed by the first charge of electricity, her body flaps defiantly in the breeze at the end of the execution, as it is subjected to jolt after jolt.

If one cannot quite reconcile this Ethel with the Ethel of the seduction scene or the cynical Nixon who mouths cliches to save himself in Times Square with the thoughtful Nixon who dissects the trial, the problem is rooted in Coover's technique. At one point, Coover's Nixon reflects on the way associations from the previous night's dream “opened up the gates and flooded the syntax routes … it could be fun, if you didn't do it too often” (181). “Flooding the syntax routes” is an appropriate metaphor for the structure of The Public Burning, which simultaneously presents the same action from various points of view and in multiple literary styles. The use of multiple, even contradictory, narrative units appears to be characteristic of Coover's metafiction; in Coover's story, “The Baby Sitter,” he “presents not only what ‘does happen’ … but all the things which could happen.”¹¹ The result is a spatialization that denies the validity of a single sequence which constitutes “what happened” and makes any single linear track or implication of the narrative difficult to follow to its logical end.

In The Public Burning, such technique acquires a specific thematic function in the attack on the “single vision” which sentenced the Rosenbergs. Coover's Eisenhower, an architect of that vision, claims in the poem that comprises the second “Intermezzo” that “the one capital offense against freedom” is “a lack of staunch faith” (156). Eisenhower's faith denies the multiplicity of language; in Nixon's narrative, Ike is characterized as an ignorant cowboy who is unable to see that words, especially words like “freedom,” “sincerity,” and “decency” are not simple and unambiguous (230). Similarly, the “Phantom,” Uncle Sam's and Ike's enemy, is described as the “Creator of Ambiguities” (336) and seems a reflection of America's lack of critical self-awareness, its insistence on an unambiguous, linear story. Coover's Nixon, on the other hand, is self-conscious in several senses: he is the “bumbling” Nixon, an inept outsider; relfective and ironic, he seems almost aware of himself as a character in a fiction. He is a Nixon aware of himself as Nixon, a post-Watergate scapegoat, a series of media cliches, and a source of much of the novel's humor.

Often, as in the Times Square scenes, the reflective irony of The Public Burning is displaced by slapstick. Even here, the dreary repetitiveness which drives reader's away from the novel's “public” chapters is thematic, related to the monolithic tendencies that characterize Uncle Sam's America. The overwhelming bitterness of Coover's vision finds little that is affirmative in post-war America. The mob assembled in Times Square is there, for the most part, to witness the burning of the Rosenbergs as the ultimate media event. Entertained by the execution jokes of the Marx Brothers and the singing of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, they wait for the sacrificial killing through which, they privately hope, their individual resentments can be purged. Like the Supreme Court Justices who slide in the dung of the Republican elephant on stage, the reader is not excused but forced to confront the dreck of American culture.

At times, The Public Burning “tests one's capacity for embarrassment rather too cruelly.”¹² The characters “are shaped almost exclusively by the domination-subjugation pairing,”¹³ brought to consciousness in the text itself. Inserted between parodies of Jack Benny and Charlie McCarthy, Coover notes:

… America laughs. At much the same things everybody laughs at everywhere: sex, death, danger, the enemy, the inevitable, all the things that hurt about growing up, something that Americans especially, suddenly caught with the world in their hands, are loath to do. What makes them laugh hardest, though, are jokes about sexual inadequacy—a failure of power—and the cruder the better, for crudity recalls their childhood for them: the Golden Age.

(450)

In passages like this, The Public Burning recalls the “epic theater” of Brecht, simultaneously presenting a caricatured reduction of reality and a coment on the significance of that reduction.¹⁴

Even some of the novel's most outlandish scenes are complex, involving the ironic juxtaposition of discordant texts. Nixon's appearance with his pants down before the assembled mob in Times Square brings together the “public” and “private” narratives at a moment when, for Nixon, both worlds threaten to disintegrate. We are given a bewildered Nixon's private thoughts as he fights “to drag myself back to myself, my old safe self, which was—who knows?—maybe not even a self at all, my frazzled mind reaching out for the old catchwords, the functional code words of the profession” (471). Simultaneously, we are given in italics the “code words,” the empty rhetoric which he desperately employs.

The scene is an obvious reference to Watergate, to the actual Nixon's public entrapment in verbal duplicity with his “pants down,” but the speech he gives is also a parody of the “Checkers” speech. Many of the “code words” that Coover's Nixon utters echo directly from the famous televised address in which Nixon defended himself against accusations that he used a campaign fund for personal purposes. In “Checkers” Nixon speaks repeatedly of the “smears” against his reputation and of how difficult it is “to come before a Nation-wide audience and bare your life, as I have done.”¹⁵ Coover's Nixon, ass to the crowd, feels Ethel's lipstick inscription on his posterior and declaims (verbatim from “Checkers”): “I know that this is not the last of the smears!” (476), and eventually suggests “that under the circumstances, everybody here tonight should come before the American people and bare himself as I have done!” (482). Similarly in “Checkers,” Nixon asks that Stevenson and Sparkman come before the people with their personal financial histories and claims that “if they don't it will be an admission that they have something to hide.” At the end, Coover's Nixon asks the crowd for “support” in a number of high-minded patriotic endeavors, finally exhorting “everyone tonight to step forward … and drop his pants for America!” (482). “Checkers” also ends with an appeal for support, for telegrams saying whether or not Senator Nixon should stay on the Republican ticket.

The parallels between the two texts can be extended, suggesting that “Checkers” is a source for The Public Burning as a whole. In the actual speech, Nixon accused Stevenson of reducing the Communist threat to a matter of “phantoms among ourselves,” thus providing Coover with a name for the novel's principle of opposition. Moreover, “Checkers” is famous for Nixon's sentimental personal narrative, in which he relates his “Horatio Alger” past—and simultaneously draws attention to himself in doing so, parenthetically noting “this is unprecedented in American politics” (a claim Coover's Nixon echoes—474). Nixon's actual text thus invokes itself as unique at precisely the point at which it is most clearly circumscribed within the limits of a traditional American ideology (reinforcing Coover's theme). In “Checkers” Nixon speaks of his work in exposing Hiss, who (like the Rosenbergs) allegedly sold atomic “secrets” to the Russians. In a classic example of implying guilt by association, Nixon claims that his primary work has been “exposing the Administration, the communism in it, the corruption in it.” The abrupt insertion of grammatically parallel elements in a speech which repeatedly notes the necessity of getting down to the simple “facts”—of telling the whole, literal truth—recalls Coover's analysis of history as a rhetorical “force-field maker” in Chapter 10. The actual Nixon provides a more telling example of the reification of history in political language than any Coover could invent.

Coover's use of the “Checkers” speech points to the central idea of The Public Burning: the attempt to move the “exposed” Nixon of Watergate (the Nixon who has become our cliche) from the context of a “tragic” personal mistake and make him representative of an American ideology gone wrong. As his use of “Checkers” illustrates, Coover tries to get inside the rhetoric of that ideology, using the metaphors it takes so literally and expanding them to the point of the absurd. The Public Burning, then, tries to make the hegemonic use of that rhetoric, dramatized in the victimization of the Rosenbergs and Nixon, into an appropriate metaphor for contemporary America.

Unfortunately, the process becomes clear only when we can stop and look at it in slow motion; too often, The Public Burning simply bombards us with the metaphors it seeks to distance us from. Coover's portrayal assumes the reader's familiarity with the rhetoric of the fifties. Moreover, the attempt to get inside that rhetoric is not matched by an attempt to evoke the society within which it functions. The search for an opposing principle to Sam is quite unresolved, even with William O. Douglas (to whom the novel is dedicated), the horde of demonstrators who recurrently appear (but who seem almost incidental), and Ethel's symbolic death. To some extent, the Rosenbergs themselves present an alternative to repression—yet, like all Coover's characters except Nixon, they appear as caricatures. Nixon, his attempt to “rewrite” history, and the narrator's comments on historical representation become the focus of the novel and, oddly, the source of a critical perspective in Coover's America, as the analysis of history as text displaces an analysis of history.

The novel, then, leaves the reader with a confusion of response. The Ethel-Nixon scene, its most unforgettable, points in every direction at once. The comic employment of the Rosenbergs' situation momentarily included seems inappropriate to the novel's generally left-liberal politics. Difficult to assimilate on the level of content, it is best understood as part of Coover's treatment of history as text, which serves as an ironic comment on the Manichean tendencies within Coover's own myth (or anti-myth) of America. The difficulty with The Public Burning remains the collision between its metafictional technique and its political content. One cannot, finally, make Richard Nixon and Ethel Rosenberg embrace. The more specific the political impulse of the text, the more difficult the dramatization of that purpose through metafiction—otherwise, politics becomes reduced to the celebration of liberation in the “openness” of the text, in the act of writing itself. The Public Burning is a novel in which Coover has taken great risks, one which helps to define the tension between the presentation of history as writing and the writing of history.

Notes

1. Thomas R. Edwards, “Real People, Mythic History,” New York Times Book Review, 14 August 1977, p. 9.

2. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 205.

3. Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 90-92.

4. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), especially pp. 1-23; also, the bibliographical essay in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, eds. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 151-58.

5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 82.

6. See Norman Podhoretz, “Uncle Sam and the Phantom,” Saturday Review, 4 (17 September 1977), 34. While Coover's earlier novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (New York: New American Library, 1971), also presents history as a “game” similar to fiction and myth, it is less clearly an historical novel than The Public Burning.

7. Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 3. Subsequent references are to this edition.

8. See Robert Scheer, America After Nixon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. xi-xxii.

9. Coover's analysis of the trial appears to draw heavily on Miriam and Walter Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), the standard study of the trial.

10. See Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), p. 192.

11. Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary Fiction (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 17; also Coover, “The Baby Sitter,” in Pricksongs and Descants (New York: New American Library, 1969), pp. 206-39.

12. Robert Towers, “Nixon's Seventh Crisis,” New York Review of Books, 24 (29 September 1977), 9.

13. Towers, p. 9.

14. See Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 1-11.

15. “Text of Senator Nixon's Speech,” Washington Post, 24 September 1952, Sect. 1, p. 4. Subsequent quotation is from this text.